No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

He actually writes about the culture and habits of rich kids. They're not elites in any practical sense. That word does not mean "inheritor." The sycophancy of the rich, the presumption that they should be expected to be somehow better than the hoi polloi, is really getting tedious.

Someone is elite because they've accomplished something, not because they've been handed something. Attempting to apply that word to the wallet is common, and remains incorrect and gross. Yes, I know the reader can very easily Google up examples. The reader should also be able to name cases where Googling up examples gives hilariously wrong information.

Rich kids have always been slackers, in every society in human history. The real change here is that we've stopped taxing them, so "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in two generations" doesn't apply anymore.

Ayn Rand was wrong. Stop expecting wealth from parents to create high quality people.

Every study ever done on the matter has shown what common sense and literature have said all along: rich people are just lazy. It is almost certainly the clearer version "everyone who can be lazy is, but many cannot afford to be."

Hell, I would be.

We've forgotten that because we now believe that they're earning their mega-wealth by giving it to bankers to be grown for them. We pretend to ourselves that because they can pay people to produce profits from money they weren't involved in earning, they're somehow doing something. Then, we point out extremely rare individual counterexamples and say "see? See? Elon exists."

The idea that their "doing nothing" is a result of lack of social pressure is disastrously undermined by that they've also done nothing when there was social pressure, throughout all of history; even to the point that several royalties fell because nobody in the royalty could be bothered to stop looking at art and having sex long enough to keep the lights on.

We should want evidence of claims like this.

Even despite the education and resource gap, even scaled to the popular bin sizes, in all of history, the vast majority of invention and business success has come from the unwashed masses.

The null hypothesis supports this as entirely expected, unrelated to what society requests. No society in history has achieved otherwise.

"It's not that the elites are saying, "Start a family and stick with it," and therefor everyone else is acting out in protest; it's that the elites are not saying it."

I'm not sure what you mean here, though--like, my point is that elite rungs of society saying "Start a family and stick with it" is simply going to be irrelevant to a lot of the people the author is talking about. Would you disagree?

Like, operationally, what difference would it make? Would unemployed, lazy, drug-addled fathers unmarried to the mothers of their children get their act together if Obama had said they should more when he was POTUS? If professors at Stanford or Harvard or Brown started writing academic papers that touted this as correlated with success?

I think this is more than me just being sassy here; the author has, IMO, failed to articulate a nexus between the problematic behavior he is calling out and the on-the-ground results he laments.

The hints contained in the article about what he seems to think or imply a better situation would like just don't seem...realistic. E.g., the UN lady vocally and openly supporting stable family units and this making it into the final product of whatever they were doing--it just strikes me as nakedly preposterous that anything contained in a UN report would have a real impact on the individual behavior of anyone in America.

And I get that that's a very isolated example and that the aggregate effect of all those little interactions and omissions may be real, large, and worthy of serious attention. I just don't see the fundamental link between the phenomenon and the problems he is concerned with.

Again, I think the ultimate issue with the article is that the people he is talking about already aren't trying to strive by the criteria of whatever mixed-bag of societal values we do have. Middle-class and higher, people value education. In terms of children, they are having them later and later in life (outside of certain communities, usually religious, but sometimes ethnic/racial in general). People generally value work and they value taking care of their families. So the people in the article are already failing to take heed.

Indeed, most of us don't seem to need some distinct and clear societal emphasis on not having a kid out-of-wedlock at age 21 after having not tried to pursue either higher education or some stable trade/skill. If anything, I can't think of any group that doesn't stigmatize this. Even the groups he is referring to in the article don't need to be told that's not the proper way; it's just sadly somehow become normalized for them.

We are in a Masculine Crisis, and both men and women are suffering, because gender isn't zero-sum, and a society that damages men is just as harmful to heterosexual women, who struggle to find men. Late-stage capitalism's breakdown of the family (which it molded into a bourgeois form, then let rot) happened in black communities about 40 years before it started to hit rural whites. This makes it hard to sympathize with the so-called "white working class", who clutched their pearls and moralized and showed no sympathy at all when this dysfunction was hitting blacks in Detroit, half a century ago.

What is a Masculine Crisis? Well, I think this sentence hits it straight on:

Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.

When you tell men that the only way to be masculine is to "provide", and then deprive them of all means to provide except to subject oneself to the whims of a high-status person--a person given that status not on merit but simple random accidents of heredity--you leave them without a decent choice at all. Not playing is no option (a man must "provide") but every play is a losing one (the requisite self-emasculation of subordination). Whether this is a condition of low expectations (society has given up on men) or high ones (as workplace pressures mount, due to the erosion of worker's rights and dignity) is irrelevant; either way, it shuts people down.

Of course, the experience is pretty awful for women, too. Work, for 95% of people in this society, is just horrid. No one should have to do stupid shit to survive--I hope we can agree on that. I just don't think this particular social ill is as gutting for women as it is for men.

When it comes to the Masculine Crisis, we on the left are really missing the opportunity. Ex falso quodlibet; principle of (possibly literal) explosion. When no options exist for someone, he tends to make one. I'm not an accelerationist of any kind (leftist or rightist) but acceleration is happening. Alas, the left is so deep in the cul-de-sac of gender being entirely socially constructed (which is not true) and therefore meaningless (which it's not) that they can't figure out how to operate in this environment. So, instead, the Masculine Crisis is left to be exploited by the center-right (Jordan Peterson) or worse, the actual fascists.

Conditions like this produce war. Why? Because five thousand years of human history have produced exactly one situation in which a man can be subordinate and still accept himself as a man--to pick up a weapon and join an army of some kind. Mind you, I don't want war; I'm staunchly against it except as a last resort. However, conditions like those in the modern workplace (except for those born into hereditary wealth) are at such a level as to throw young men into hopelessness... and they will often do anything for those who promise any kind of hope, no matter false.